I advise all of my customers to have a blog. I think it one of the best things that you can do to help yourself get better search engine rankings. There are several good reasons for having a blog:
- Having new content on your site if one of the best things that you can do to get your visitors to return on a regular basis. The search engines recognize this as well and will reward you for regularly adding new content.
- If you can get your visitors to add comments to your posts that counts as more new content. So even though your content is written by others, because it is on your site it counts as your content.
There are also some disadvantages:
- If you don’t add content on a regular (or at least semi-regular) basis your site looks stale to both your visitors and search engines.
- Anytime you allow others to add to your site you will get Spam. The scourge of the Internet and if you allow these ads for gambling, porn, or “medicine” on your site it makes you look as bad as them.
I use Word Press for this blog and it’s security settings were pretty good, in that it would hold these junk posts in a file until I could delete them. That wasn’t too bad at first because they tended to come in big blocks that could be pretty easily be tagged and deleted. Unfortunately as this blog grew in popularity so did this crap. I was well over 200 spam posts a day and it was getting very annoying. For some reason my Halloween post tends to be a real magnet for this stuff.
I went looking for help, found Spam Karma 2, tried it out and it has worked wonders. Not only has it made it easier to deal with these posts, my count has gone from over 200 a day to just 5 or 10.
Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is a free anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. It works very well, is simple to install and I recommend it highly.